After spending over 50 years on and around the water, I have realized that without strong fisheries laws and effective conservation measures, the future of salt water fishing, and America's living marine resources, is dim. Yet conservation is given short shrift by national angling organizations and the angling press. I hope that this blog will incite, inform and inspire salt water fishermen to reclaim their traditional role as the leading advocates for the conservation of America's fisheries.

Thursday, April 21, 2016

FROM THE HEAD OF THE RIVERS TO THE HEART OF THE SEA

Right now, striped bass are headed up New York’s Hudson
River, preparing to spawn. Folks who
don’t fish for stripers are often surprised.
They think of the Hudson as something dead, and not the vitally
important river that it was, is and always should be.

In truth, the Hudson’s bad reputation is overdone, and also
very far out of date. Not very long ago,
as time is measured by species and rivers, the Hudson was heading toward a tragic demise. Sewage dumped into the river,
along with varied industrial wastes, led to hypoxic “dead zones” where fish
could hardly survive, much less reproduce.

Things got so bad that the New York State Department of
Environmental Conservation shut down the commercial bass fishery not only on
the river but, for a while, in all of the State of New York, in order to prevent
people from consuming PCB-tainted bass.
Over the years, the PCB-producing factories were all shut down, and a
massive remediation project has removed PCB-laden silt from the river. The commercial striped bass fishery in some
New York waters reopened long ago.

“Women under 50 years of age and children under 15 should not
eat any fish from the Hudson River downstream of the Corinth Dam.”

Everyone else is warned not to eat fish from a long section
of river running from above Albany well down toward the ocean due to remaining
PCB contamination, and to eat fish from
the lower reaches of the river just one time each month.

Warnings even apply out past the river’s mouth, although in New York’s
salt waters, younger women and children may safely consume one meal of striped
bass each month, while all other persons are advised to limit their monthly
intake to just fourer servings.

River herring suffered the same fate as shad. Although they once ran up just about every
creek and river that flowed into the sea, and thus had far more potential
spawning grounds, dams in the rivers and bycatch in the sea caused their
numbers to fall sharply as well.

Yet the problems of striped bass, river herring and shad are
not as great as those faced by salmon, which spend most of their lives out at
sea, vulnerable to threats from many sources, and reproduce in rivers with
myriad problems.

On the U.S. East Coast, Atlantic salmon are all but
gone.

They travel far during their time
in the ocean, to waters
off Greenland, where local netters decimate their numbers; even those that
survive are threatened by a warming northern ocean that impacts their ability
to feed. When they return to their natal
streams, they face the same problems that frustrate too many other anadromous species; dams block upstream passage, and what spawning habitat remains
accessible is vulnerable to pollution and other forms of degradation.

Pacific salmon pose a more intricate puzzle. They form a complex web
of not only individual species, but unique salmon “runs” within the same species that differ somewhat from river to river, and have their own management needs. Some individual runs are “endangered”. Others are completely healthy, at
least at this time.

The bottom line is that anadromous fish—those that spawn in
the rivers but live in the sea—are facing serious threats wherever they are
found. Countering those threats, in
order to conserve the healthy stocks and rebuild those that have declined, is going to take a new approach to the management process.

To adequately protect anadromous fish stocks, everyone must step out of their silos, which protect certain fish in certain pieces of
water, and work hand-in-hand to adopt a comprehensive, integrated management approach that reaches out
from the heads of natal rivers into the heart of the sea, and assures that
wherever the fish may wander through the course of their lives, they will be given sufficient protection.

It will not be easy to get there. No law provides for such comprehensive management
today (although, in dire circumstances only, the Endangered Species Act comes
somewhat close), and adopting an integrated approach will step on many
jurisdictional toes. Stakeholders will
undoubtedly be wary of any new management layer, while bureaucrats will
undoubtedly object when “outsiders” invade what they consider their
own personal fiefs.

Yet, if runs of anadromous fish are to thrive, there is no
viable alternative.

For so long as one dam on a river can keep salmon from spawning after long years at sea, and one mid-water trawl in the ocean can destroy all of the alewives that a river produced in a year, such fishes’ future must remain insecure.